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Comment Re:Be careful what you ask for (Score 5, Insightful) 239

WHY do they act like visa and mastercard are the only players in this game.

Because, functionally, they are. The Visa/Mastercard Cartel has a lock on more than 80% of the market. "American Express" sits at 18%, because they signed a cartel alignment deal with V/MC.

Discover, by contrast, sits at 2% of the market by transaction frequency.

Vote for people that break up monopolies and don't take bribes to let monolithic companies grow even bigger.

Wouldn't that be nice? Unfortunately, the Corrupt Shitrag Trump Administration just dropped the Antitrust lawsuit against V/MC that Biden's DOJ had filed last September. Republicans are corrupt shitrags who WANT cartel monopolies like this, because then a corrupt Fascist regime like Trump's can do precisely what's been done here.

Comment Re:Next up... (Score 4, Informative) 81

Gizmodo should be retracting their writeup and slapping the writer for needless sensationalism. The supposed "refuting a well established theory in physics" isn't real - the theory in question is about stability of crystalline lattice structures. And the writeup itself is self-contradictory.

Beyond those temperatures, superheated gold is supposed to reach the so-called “entropy catastrophe”—or, in more colloquial terms, the heated gold should’ve blown up....To be fair, this superheated state lasted for a mere several trillionths of a second. Also, it blew up.

Comment Re:Falling birthrate (Score 1) 162

The problem with the K-12 system is that it's just _bad_. There is no drive for excellence, so students that don't have engaged parents are just coasting. In some places (Seattle) you could graduate with a passing score without even attending the classes and randomly filling out the tests. Then there are busybodies that try to cancel math and magnet schools because they're racist (see: California).

There's a lot of variability here. The Seattle and California models are baffling to me. Totally agree that the US system is largely focused on irrelevant (or immutable) things. I have a kid in highschool now. His peer group is very, very impressive. Multiple perfect scores on the ACT every year. ~55% of the highschool is English-language learners and 60%+ is free lunch eligible (meaning poverty level or close). There's an engineering magnet program that does really, really cool stuff. The school was on lockdown 3 times last year for gang fights.

It's a tough environment, comparatively.

This is really apparent when you look at college admission tests. In the US you have SAT tests that are trivially easy to pass with perfect scores (more than 2% of people get them!), and ACT with a bit more reasonable 0.22% of perfect scores. In China you have Gaokao where _nobody_ ever got the perfect score, in Korea you have CSAT with something like 5 people a year getting perfect scores, etc.

I have a different take! What's the point of a test that nobody ever gets a perfect score? I guarantee you that I can design a test that nobody ever aces, but it also wouldn't be worth anything. I think there needs to be a middle ground between overtesting, teaching to the test, and tests being the be all and end all of education, and the loosey goosey approach one often encounters in the US (most commonly among leftists) that thinks all testing is bad and racist and invalid and hurts kids.

Another thing to look at is the competitions. You can likely remember your high school's football team name, but you probably have never heard about your school's math olympiad teams. Schools in the US spend a lot of money on stadiums and gyms, but hardly any on academic competitions. It's the opposite in China and Russia. Nobody cares about the athletic performance, but schools actively compete academically with each other.

You are probably assuming the wrong things given the demographics of Slashdot and those few of us who have hung on for decades at this point! I was not on the math team, but I had friends who were. I participated in both Latin and Computer Science competitions (and marching band). Our football team sucked (I know this from marching band). But yeah, I'm sure a huge amount of money was spent on the gym and fields and athletics, far beyond what was spent on supporting the best academic achievers.

You will get NO argument from me that America's obsession with sports, from the cradle to the grave, is hugely detrimental to our society and culture.

I hope that the current mess with NIL, paying college athletes (I will NOT call them "student athletes" -- what a joke) forces some or many schools to back off on their sports expenditures and focuses, but I'm not holding my breath.

Comment Re:Falling birthrate (Score 1) 162

It's mostly an artifact of the way the Science proficiency is tested, the questions are mostly the logic-type deduction questions and require little if any specific knowledge. If you look at physics in particular, the US is far behind China.

Hey, I asked you your metric, I wasn't planning on nitpicking it!

China is not a member of the OECD, but they did unofficial scoring for the Beijing-Shanghai area, and they came out in the top 3 countries.

Sure, just like micro-regions, individual demographic groups in the US, etc., score higher.

IMHO, US public education is amongst the very best in the world at the high end and pretty bad at the low end. The real confounding factor is that demographics are hard to escape.

Comment Re:Falling birthrate (Score 1) 162

I agree PISA is a reasonable standard.

So, in the context of STEM that you raised, the US scored 14 points above average, #16 in Science placement. That seems strong to me.

Math is slightly below average (-4 points), number 34. Weak.

Reading, US placed #9, seems strong again.

You mentioned immigrants being the majority of STEM students. I don't know if that is true, but, using the metric you picked of PISA scores, some of the countries that send the most immigrants to the US in STEM .... have no data available. Nothing for China, India, Pakistan, etc. India seems to have scored exceedingly poorly the last time they participated.

The chart at the bottom of the Wikipedia page that includes 2015 US State results and racial breakdowns for the Mathematics portion for the US over multiple years is fascinating, and I think, should make an impact on your thinking.

(For instance, in the 2018 math results, Asian students in the US scored 539, whites scored 503, and the US average was 478. That puts US Asian students between Hong Kong and Taiwan in position #5 and white students in between Seden and Finland at #20. Black students in the US scored 419, the level of Thailand and Uruguay, around the upper 50s in rank. Kind of changes things a bit?)

Comment Anecdote rather than data... (Score 1) 98

Both of my grandarents died from lung ailments.

One of my grandfathers worked in factories his entire life, smoked for about 20 years of his youth, and and was generally of the socioeconomic level that wasn't able to live an extremely healthy lifestyle. He developed emphysema and associated conditions, and died in his low 70s. He had been on oxygen for years at that point.

My other grandfather never smoked a day in his life, never drank, worked in academia, swam daily until sometime in his 80s, and died right around age 90--from lung cancer! One of the doctors asked him if he had any career asbestos exposure and he answered "Well I did go down into an asbestos mine in 1934..."

You never know what will get you, but dying at age 90 and being in good physical and mental shape is pretty good by me!

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